Phil Schiller Leaving Apple, Handing Off the App Store on Tim Cook’s Last Day

Watch any Apple keynote from the last twenty years and you were watching Phil Schiller's work. Follow any App Store fight of the last ten and you were watching him take the punches. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports he has stepped back from both jobs.

Per that report, Schiller has given up running the App Store and overseeing Apple's product events. He stays at the company as an Apple Fellow, working on projects nobody has described publicly. Apple has not announced any of it: no press release, no memo, no comment. Executive changes at Apple normally show up with a scripted quote attached.

It landed on Cook's last day

Today is Tim Cook's last day as Apple's CEO. John Ternus has the job now and Cook moves to chairman. Nine days from today, on September 9, Apple holds the first iPhone event of the Ternus era. That is the week the events handoff reportedly landed.

Schiller is also not the only one heading for the door. Jeff Williams retired as COO in December after 27 years. Lisa Jackson and general counsel Kate Adams both announced exits the same month. Jennifer Bailey, who built Apple Pay, retires in October after more than two decades. Paul Meade left the Vision Pro group in June for OpenAI. Apple has spent the year rebuilding its top row, and Schiller's move lands on the day the CEO changes.

Where the App Store goes now

Gurman reports the App Store moves out of marketing and into Eddy Cue's services division, with Carson Oliver running it day to day. Oliver has been at Apple for more than a decade and was Schiller's deputy on the store. Ann Thai, who handles app distribution tools and third-party marketplaces, and Alex Rofman, who runs Apple Arcade, both report to him.

Cue's division is where Apple Music, iCloud, and Apple TV live. The App Store now sits next to them, under the executive who runs Apple's subscription business, after a decade under the one who ran its marketing. Developers wake up to the same rules and a different set of people writing them.

Events go to Nola Weinstein, Schiller's deputy on product launches since 2023. She reports to Kristin Huguet Quayle, Apple's VP of communications, which moves Apple's keynotes from a marketing operation to a PR one. Her first show in charge is September 9.

The job he is actually putting down

Schiller joined Apple in 1987, left in 1993, and came back in 1997 with Steve Jobs. He ran worldwide marketing as an SVP until 2020, when Greg Joswiak took that title and Schiller became an Apple Fellow. He kept the App Store, and the App Store kept getting harder.

He was Apple's public face on the argument that its cut of every sale paid for a safe, curated store: through the Epic Games suit, through the EU's Digital Markets Act, through compliance demands in Brazil and Japan. Gurman has reported he was putting in close to 80 hours a week on it in 2024. Apple won most of the Epic case and the judge threw out the monopoly claims, but the court still made Apple let developers link out to their own payment systems. That fight is still running.

People inside Apple told Bloomberg this reads as a step toward retirement. Maybe. The nearer-term change is who sets App Store policy, and it now sits in Cue's org, at the moment Apple is arguing in several countries over whether it should get to set that policy at all.